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... Descartes, he denied that such ideas correspond to reality; he insisted that they are merely
subjective constructs, inapplicable to “things-in-themselves.” Hence his theory synthesized
the worst errors of his predecessors: He combined the arbitrary method of the rationalists
with the skeptical conte ...

... In discussing modern physics in the perspective of critical philosophy we first ask what does physical understanding involve, and then how the structural scheme offered by the transcendental philosophy can be used in this discussion, both concerning the development and the interpretation of
physical ...

... This brings us back to our starting point: what is the real problem of
consciousness? Can it be approached by means of the natural sciences at
all? What exactly do we wart to know? These questions — especially the
last one, the setting of the epistemic goal — are typical philosophical
questions. As ...

... fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards
concretenesss and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means
the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the
open air and possibilities of natu ...

... amount to nothing but fossilized old theories.
Some philosophers dislike the idea that they are in the same business as science. They
think that this demeans their discipline, denying it any special subject matter or method.
But the view that philosophical theories are eventually answerable to empir ...

... of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not
accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him.
This does not prevent us each from believing that the other's
experience has such a subjective character.)
If anyone is inclined to deny that we can believe in the existence o ...

... The present is here for one moment and gone the next. The Now hardly exists as a phenomenon. It can only be experienced in hindsight. As I understand Hoy, he is skeptical about
the present as a separate mode of temporality. The present needs to be understood in relation
to other modes of temporality ...

... science tells us that there is a significant gap between the physical nature of the world and
how our consciousness perceives it: our sense of sight, for example, which informs us
about our environment more than any other sense, presents to us an illuminated and
colorful world. But light is nothing ...

... (Organon) and Beckon (New organon) by this expressing his claim to be some manifestant of all ideas
of idealistic philosophy. Due to fact that Ouspensky himself did not recognize physics as being
possible to solve main mysteries of human existence, he is generally considered as mystic, but here
we a ...

... The cumulative insight of the Vedantic tradition leads it to describe
Brahman, or the ultimate reality, as saccidānanda. This word is a compound of three words: sat, which means reality; cit, which means consciousness; and ānanda, which means bliss. Inherent in this description are profound claims a ...

... are cannot be decided with recourse only to logical analysis. To hold that formal and substantial
atomicity come apart is to hold that logical and ontological form come apart, and hence to reject the
mirror thesis. I take it that in order to be able to justify our ontological conclusions we must rej ...

... on this controversy. It suffices for my present purposes that there has been such a
controversy. How is this to be explained? Surely not by saying that one of the
parties in the controversy was fortunate enough to see a relation of identity between,
e.g., the page I hold now and the page I held earl ...

... of the concept of identity imply that between the so-called "two" things there is a
relation that might be called identity. Let us consider some cases so simple that if
such a relation were present it would surely be readily discernible.
I am now reading this page of my paper. Is the page I am hold ...

... wanted to add items to the common sense worldview, while others wanted to
subtract them, and still others wanted to change it completely. By examining
even the little of what we know about the Presocratic philosophers we will be in a
better position to understand how it was that Socrates rebelled ag ...

... independent existence. He does not refute the empirical existence of things. This is what
he is explaining when he states: “MMK 15.10 'It exists' implies grasping after eternity. 'It
does not exist' implies the philosophy of annihilation. Therefore, a discerning person
should not decide on either ex ...

... Realism in modern philosophy is a doctrine according to
which ordinary objects perceived by senses, such as
tables and chairs, have an existence independent of their
being perceived.
It is contrary to the idealism of philosophers such as
George Berkeley or Immanuel Kant.
In its extreme form, also ca ...

... reality. This view has been continually brought into doubt by the modern physical sciences;
however, these doubts have not led to a new and complementary concept of reality but to a
calamitous separation between philosophy and the modern physical sciences. It has served
only to sharpen that dualism ...

... 'President Obama exists' and 'Elephants (as opposed to dinosaurs) exist'.1
Miller was aware that most philosophers in the Western tradition going back to
Greek philosophy have denied that existence is a real property; the only period in which
that view was widely held was the high middle ages. (The ...

... direct ‘contact’ with it, so to speak: the relation between the perceiver and perceived is a part of them
both and they are thus parts of one another in some sense (it is an ‘active’ relation, in our above
terminology). Such perception does not mean that one thing simply causes another thing, the p ...

... and only to persons (i.e. any rational beings, including for example Martians). This problem
is – how general are the ideas which we can form from our experience of the world? The
other problem is: in what ways is it permissible to combine ideas so as to form other ideas?
Can we combine the idea of ...

... III. Davidson’s Deflationary Externalism
At first blush, the likelihood of finding a more substantive notion of representation in
Davidson’s work does not appear promising. Davidson seems, at times, to have taken
a rather dim view of the prospect of a representational relation between language, on
t ...

... balanced with another important and natural intuition: the need to conceive
of truth as potentially revisable (the view known as ‘fallibilism’). 1 As finite
beings, we cannot exclude the possibility that an assertion or a belief, even
if justified now, could turn out to be false at some point in the ...

... microscope, we could discriminate indefinitely smaller units of time.
The fourth and final theme is closely connected to each of the previous three.
Those pre‐James authors who most clearly espouse something akin to the specious
present doctrine do so as a consequence of endorsing a particular i ...

Eternalism (philosophy of time)

Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all points in time are equally ""real"", as opposed to the presentist idea that only the present is real and the growing block universe theory of time in which the past and present are real while the future is not. Modern advocates often take inspiration from the way time is modeled as a dimension in the theory of relativity, giving time a similar ontology to that of space (although the basic idea dates back at least to McTaggart's B-Theory of time, first published in The Unreality of Time in 1908, only three years after the first paper on relativity). This would mean that time is just another dimension, that future events are ""already there"", and that there is no objective flow of time. It is sometimes referred to as the ""block time"" or ""block universe"" theory due to its description of space-time as an unchanging four-dimensional ""block"", as opposed to the view of the world as a three-dimensional space modulated by the passage of time.